A simple but effective Flash 8 effect. This is part of a bunch of effects I am going to release as soon as possible. It should be a familiar effect to anyone who has been in contact with the demo-scene around 1990-1996.
Turns out it’s pretty easy to do using the displacement map filter. In the old days they used to create 2 lookup tables to do this trick; one transposing the pixel’s original x to a radial point (or any transform in that case), and one transposing that pixel y’s to a ‘depth’. Although this effect would almost alway run on any platform, doing this effect pixel by pixel proofs to heavy for the flashplayer, as betaruce showed to us earlier. Mikko (one my colleague’s at Satama) took the time to explain this effect to me in detail, and the possible added tricks, and in the plane to Denmark (where I am right now) I figured a displacement map is exactly the same as these 2 luts, so using the displacementmapfilter is just as valid as using per pixel LUT’s. The only issues compared to the original method would be that you can’t do that much with the depth (like lighting etc) that easy. But the speed proofs fenominal using the displacement filters. I am still playing with this, so no sources yet, but I will release them this week. Click the preview image for the example.

Endorphins (thomas [at] mediawar.com), provided the music (Endorphins-Tamin’ textures-”Tile based worlds”) for this little demo. Thanks again Thomas!